Step up moral obligation when conducting business - Bank Negara

He said the financial sector must take a holistic, thoughtful and realistic approach in building a culture of professionalism and ethics.

"We cannot afford to underestimate the power and danger of "bad barrels". The evidence demands that we focus carefully on cultivating a system and designing that encourage continuous ethical behaviour," he said in his keynote address at the AIF-FSBP Business Ethics Conference 2017 here today.

Abdul Rasheed said that although regulators played a crucial role in articulating the letter of the law, the private sector also played an important role to determine whether the moral spirit should be pursued.

He also said the finance community must not neglect the uncomfortable reality that there are "bad apples" out there.

"A clear message needed to be sent out, that the financial industry does not have room for these. Fair, proportionate and transparent disciplinary action will be central in communicating this message," he said.

Earlier, Abdul Rasheed quoted Greece philosopher , Plato, who said "good people don''t need laws to tell them to act responsibly, and bad people will find a way around the laws. There are "good apples" and there are "bad apples" and the state of the apples has nothing to do with "the barrel".

He also shared an example in the Malaysian financial landscape, whereby the local financial industry was not invulnerable to the ethical challenge.

In the 1980s and 90s, Malaysia, according to him, had cases of local banks suffering significant losses arising from imprudent lending under ethically questionable decisions by top management.

"In the past two years, more than RM100 million in fines were meted out for breaches under the purview of BNM and the Securities Commission.

"A study led by the University of Malaya and the Asian Institute of Chartered Bankers in 2014 revealed that 43 per cent of employees within the Malaysian conventional banking sector had observed or had first-hand knowledge of wrong doings in the workplace," he said, adding that the ethical challenge for leaders in the corporate and public sectors were to build this conducive culture.

"Let us focus on these three elements - system, situation and people," he said, adding that beginning Jan 1, 2018, the central bank would introduce a strengthened transparency framework for its enforcement action, to serve as a deterrence against misconduct.